Ok, apparently I've been posting on a non issue. That's fine, if I'm the only one feeling like this then it's clearly my problem. Not a big one I might add - I still love the game and have put at least 100 hours in by now.


But it's not research for the sake of research. It's research to win the ...

Between playing the campaign - and yes, I did play through the campaign - and lots of real games, I learned to anticipate that even if I wasn't seeing biters now, I would eventually, and I wanted decent defenses before they showed up. I had a terrible time with the campaign before I learned to ...

I can't really relate to this at all. I tried the campaign once as an afterthought, but the Freeplay is where I spend 99.99% of my Factorio time.

My early game motivation was having seen the trailer for the game, witnessed what was possible to do, and then went ahead and spent money on it.
From ...

TL;DR :
There is no reason to actually build anything when starting a new game. The end goal (rocket facility/space station) is not palpable at that point, yet it is the only ingame reason to start crafting/mining/building anything. Early game motivation is needed to suck in especially (but not ...